Creative musings in bright colors

Posts tagged ‘shimmer’

I’ve just seen so many people doing complicated double accent nails, and I wanted to try it! Also I love this purple.

I feel like I cheated with this because the complicated nails are just water decals. This whole mani took under an hour, and as usual, most of that was waiting for the polish to dry! Unfortunately, the decal nails did need a white base (instead of just applying them over a base-coated nail) because the decals are not opaque. They are beautiful regardless!

I love this manicure. It is incredibly simple (its just a stamp) but the COLORS. Also, the base is seriously one of my favorite polishes. I almost never reach for it, but whenever I wear it I have to question my sanity about wearing anything else!

There isn’t much to say about this. I actually wore it back in late Fall (hence the darker colors) but I don’t care. It is stunning. I want a dress that looks like Marrow Sea. To be fair, I remain obsessed with shimmery polishes, and this one has it in spades!

Unfortunately, I still haven’t replaced my gold stamping polish, so all of my more recent manicures that involve metallic stamps have featured the same rose gold that you can see here. I really need to buy a new gold! I suppose it makes sense, but the only colors I ever run out of are my basic stamping polishes (black, white, gold, silver) and nude cremes. I want to buy more crazy glitters, but I never use them up! Too bad 🙂

Another pink over teal mani! But this one is ALL SHINY. I kinda wish I had used a creme base honestly, but somehow the silver is metallic, the pink is metallic, and the teal has pink metallic shimmer. This was really quite shiny!

I’m pretty sure this is double stamped with the same gradient, which is why some of the lines aren’t exactly these same thickness? Or maybe the stamp just looks like that. I am far too lazy to check!

Flowers! I feel like it has been a while since I posted something floral. Of course, it is the beginning of March so I figured it would be warm-ish out. I was wrong. It snowed yesterday and is likely to snow again on Sunday. Oh well! Flowers anyway :-p

I wanted to make a flowers-fanning-out-in-purple appearance, but the base I used has copious yellow/pink shimmer (I forgot to post the swatch before the nail art, oops!) so it kinda looks yellow-to-purple. I like it anyway but it has a very different flavor!

This mani is halfway between winter and spring: winter colors but with flowers and a butterfly! Given how cold (and snowy) it continues to be, I thought that was fitting.

This is a new-to-me polish, and I love it. For some reason I am super into shimmers right now, and this is subtle, elegant, and loaded with shimmer! What you see here is three thin coats of Quixotic Polish – It Rubbed Off From Friction. This polish is one of my only purchases from Hella Handmade Creations (I usually stick to Polish Pickup). The polish is is a beautiful dark grey-mauve swimming with pink shimmer, which also has a scattering of holo glitter. That said, while I love the color of the polish, it was a little thick and hard to work with.

I then made some stamping decals/advanced stamping (aka coloring the stamp in while it is on the stamper) using silver and purple. The color combo could have been a bit better, but it wasn’t terrible. I rather wish I had used black not silver! Or maybe simply white.

This mani is a mess. I wanted to make something subtle and swirly, and decided to give Sandy a second shot. The first time I used this polish it took 4 coats and was still barely opaque…and since it has a lot of glitter and flakies, it was quite thick. This mani ALSO took 4 coats and honestly I give up. Sandy is moving to my “pretend this is a topper” section in my nail art room.

It also doesn’t help that on my easier-to-image left hand I decided to plan out where each part of my swirly stamp was going to go…and on my right hand I just winged it. The right hand looked much better in the end! But I took very few photos because the photos of my left always come out better. Silly me.

Time for a top 10 post! Every year I do two of them: my favorite 10 new polishes of that year (some of which will be new to me but have existed for a while, and this year about half of which are from the Polish Pickup Pack because that is where I keep getting new polish), and a second post that is my top 10 favorite nail art from this blog in 2018! I always look forward to other bloggers top 10s as well, so I know which polishes to buy! Here we go:

10. Zoya – Isadora
I think this is the only Zoya polish on the list, but it was close between this and Kelsey (a bright pink that I have used a bunch in nail art but only once by itself) but really I felt that I wanted to reward Zoya for making more beautiful metallics. I own a lot of purple metallics, and Isadora is just so pretty!

9. Polished for Days – From the Land of Oz
I have worn this polish probably 4 times since I got it from the Polish Pickup Pack, which given just how many polishes I own is really impressive! It is purple, blue, teal, and made of flakies, just how I like it! The colors and finish comes together nicely, and Polished for Days appears to make the best flakie suspension polishes. I think off all the new brands I discovered this year, PfD might be my favorite! I keep stalking their website waiting for a sale :-p

8. Ever After – Playing with Fire
This is another find from Polish Pickup, and it is a beauty. I wish I wasn’t stuck in residency so that I could wear this more frequently! I had been searching for a black-with-rainbows and had been disappointed in holo (because it never looks as rainbow as I’d like in a black base), glitter (too darn hard to remove), and settled on flakies…and this is just perfect. Technically the base is a very dark blue but I just cannot get over the combination of flakies. It is a perfect rainbow in a bottle.

7. Painted Polish – Just One Look
Is this prettier than #8 and #9 on my list? No. But is it cool looking AND can I wear it to the hospital? Yes. So this pale periwinkle with medium and small holo glitters takes 7th place. This is yet another Polish Pickup shade (are you guys sensing a theme here?) but I know other brands make similar colors and finishes. I happen to like it because it is a stunning color, work appropriate, and glittery to boot!

6. ILNP – Downpour
This polish. I got 4 new dark blue/teal holographic polishes this year and this one takes the cake. I have been wearing this on my toes since I got it and I regret nothing. Downpour has it all: dark blue, holo shards and glitters, and a metallic finish that makes it glow. That inner glow is really what sets it apart from the other of my new blue holos. I was on the fence when I first received it, but it has quickly grown to be the blue I reach for! The only caveat is that it takes 3 coats rather than 2.

5. ILNP – Fired Up
The next on the list is also an ILNP polish, this time Fired Up. Last year, Rosewater made my top 10, and Fired Up is the orange sister to Rosewaters pink. I love them both! This polish is just so darn glittery and shimmery, but somehow still wearable. It just makes me happy.

4. CbL – Frohe Feiertage!
If we are being honest Frohe Feiertage! and Fired Up are very similar. The difference is Frohe Feiertage! has a gold base and is a tad more subtle (aka more wearable in the hospital). I have worn this polish 3-4 times as well. It was my first (and thus far only) CbL but I can see why everyone loves the finish on these polishes! It was also a Polish Pickup buy.

3. Born Pretty – Astral Realm
I think this is the first time a Born Pretty polish has made my top 10 list? And in the top 3 at that! This is a polish I was sent to review and I fell completely in love. I have ok luck with magnetic polishes, and had been lusting after a magnetic multichrome when I got this. And it just. Works. Its amazing. Even my old many-straight-parallel-lines magnet, which usually looks like a blurry mess, worked like a charm. Yes, this polish requires a black base. Yes it is in a small bottle. No I don’t care, if all magnetics were all this pretty I would never buy anything else!

2. Emily de Molly – Traverse the Skies
I meant to put this polish on the top 10 LAST year but forgot that I hadn’t posted the nail art it went with! Regardless, this polish is absolutely stunning and has become my platonic ideal of what a shimmer with flakie shards should look like. I love it. If you don’t own this polish and like blue, purple, silver, or just pretty looking nails in general, go buy it. You won’t regret it.

1. Polished for Days – Grey Opal
This polish made #1 by dint of being stunning, elegant, work-appropriate, and easy to remove despite its flakie burden. Kudos to Polished for Days! Unfortunately this beauty was another Polish Pickup special, but PfD makes a lot of similarly finished and colored polishes on their website. This polish was opaque in two coats, had perfect control on the brush, and was just overall wonderful to work with and wear.

Thats my top 10 for the year! Moral: Polished for Days is amazing, join the Polish Pickup Pack if you haven’t already, and I am really into nude shimmers and blurples this year! What were your favorite polishes this year that I should invest in?

More blurple! Other than nude, purple/blurple/periwinkle is probably my most used color this year (I don’t know why). It is also easily my most-bought polish family this year!

This particular color combination was REALLY tone-on-tone, and yet worked well! The scrubs I have to wear when I am on ICU blocks and in the emergency department are a pastel periwinkle-grey…which sounds pretty but lets be honest scrubs do not look good on ANYONE (and I am no exception). That said, when my nails match my scrubs I feel a tad bit classier than I have any right to when wearing scrubs! Hence all the blurple and periwinkle nails (never fear, there are more coming in the next few weeks :-p).

Copycat Claws posted a blue-and-white moroccan tile design that I love and want to copy… but while I am in the hospital I should probably avoid bright blue nails! At least as I started out. So I decided that if I couldn’t do blue, I could at least try nude! (To be fair I pained these back in July, before I realized no one would care much about my nails). That said, these came out well if I do say so myself!

I used four nude-toned polishes and two shimmery toppers to make this. Since I only have one clear stamper that works well, I had to do each nail individually. It wasn’t DIFFICULT but I did take a long time!

I’ll meet o keep in mind that I have to try this in blue at a later point! I do admit though, it isn’t very harvest-y, and unfortunately I have to admit I didn;t have time to put together a real Thanksgiving mani! But the rest of this week is at least fall-themed :-p. Hope you enjoyed!

I don’t know what I was aiming for with this mani! I wanted something that looked cold and windy (it snowed for the first time on Friday, and is supposed to snow again today) and it felt appropriate! I started with a grey-white shimmery base and added some stamped swirls, and then colored them in. I don’t know if this was the best idea, or if I should have gone for some creme polishes to color in the wind!

Regardless, the base color her is a new polish called Sandy by KBShimmer. It is from the August PPP. The swatches I saw made it look beautiful, which it is, but I didn’t look correctly at the layer count. This is three THICK coats, and the second time I wore it, it took 4 coats! No one has time for that. So, while I do like how it looks, I think I am relegating it to a topper. Fail.

That said, the polish is a pretty pale grey with lots of purple shimmer than shits to blue, and tons of silver holo shards. I am currently into polishes with silver shards, for whoever reason! The base is a crelly for ease of sparkle, but I know (because I own) crellys that are 2-3 coats and not 3-4 coats. This polish is not easy to use.

I have done phoenix nails before, but possibly never this insanely bright! I got lucky that one of my stamping plates already had all these images, or I would have been painting flames for years :-p

The design itself was inspired by @nails4cocktails, although I didn’t have holo polish in the right colors, so I just added some shimmer on top. I really need to get Fairy Dust by China Glaze, I keep winging it with my glitter toppers!

Whoops! I apparently forgot to write this post until this moment! So it’s going to be a bit short (and forgive me if it is disjointed, I am very sleep deprived).

The art here is inspired by urban nail art…but for some reason I didn’t copy over the link? I don’t even know. Tired Eva makes bad decisions about planing and the like. Either way, urban nail art had a pink shimmery gradient and black flames, and I decided I wanted the same! But then I went and picked the WRONG base polish…

So, my background color here is the second lightest of the pinks (the absolute lightest is really more of a pale orange so I went with the medium one for the base under the gradient), and that was a crucial error. It is a polish called Peony by Ruby Wing, and I hate it. Really, I do. It is both scented AND filled with undissolved chunks of something. This polish makes me tear my hair out! I meed to find a buy a dupe so I can get rid of it.

What’s even worse is that I forgot one other crucial fact about Peony: it is a solar-active polish that changes color in sunlight. When I was going through the photos I started getting upset…all the ones taken outside in the sun looked like there was no gradient! And then I realized Peony’s color range is coral pink to bright pink-red. So my gradient disappeared to just bright red in the sun. :-(. I give up! The indoor photos are good, the single outdoor one is just sad.

Omg you guys. YOU GUYS. So, first off, I am super freaking proud because LOOK I DID A FOIL TRANSFER. Now, I cannot totally lay claim to this, because everything in this mani is new…new base polish, new foil transfer glue, new foils. Somehow, it worked!

To start with, the base color is two thin coats of Landon by Zoya, a mid-tone slightly dusty purple creme. The polish is pretty enough, but honestly I prefer my mid-toned purple with a pink (or even true purple) tint and not grey-out like this! Anyway, Landon is pretty enough but a bit more wintry than I am currently feeling!

However, then I added holographic foil. Because. And it is amazing. I requested some holographic nail foils from the Born Pretty Store when they asked me what I wanted to review most recently, and I asked for foil glue as well since previously I had used regular nail polish. The foil glue was a bit…tricky. I tried to just paint it on but it shrunk to just the center of my nails. So I tried to paint it on thickly and it kinda worked…so I just gave up and dapped it on a few times in places that it wasn’t covering. Despite the headache of doing things that way, it dried quickly and clearly covered all right!

I then cut the foil I wanted to use (this set comes with 12 designs….three of which were a little poorly printed and looked blob-y and the rest of which were awesome) and went and applied the foil once the glue was completely dry. Ta-da! These worked basically perfectly. I smushed them down with a makeup sponge instead of just using my finger, and I think that helped.

So, you can find 12 foil designs, of which this is one, at the Born Pretty Store for $1.79, and the foil glue for $5.29. Hope you enjoyed! I know I did 😀

This was a fun mani to put together! I always love combining multichromes an seeing what comes out of them. This was especially rewarding because I had never come up with an idea on how to use these stamps before and I love how it came out!

So, between a multichrome gradient and two different colored stamps, I ended up with a big of a complicated mani. I don’t care. For once, complicated works!

Also, this mani is a bit of a temporal milestone: I officially start residency tomorrow (in the cardiac intensive care unit) AND it’s my 30th birthday tomorrow. So, I am leaving behind my 20’s, and starting to care for really sick patients in one go. This also means that, while I will try, my posting schedule is likely to get a bit wonky while I am staffing the CCU!

I only used two multichromes in the gradient on these nails, so while the other colors do shine through, the primary purple is Undenied, and the primary gold is Greatness. Hope you enjoyed, and happy early birthday to me!

I have no excuse for this going up in the afternoon…I finished editing last night and just forgot that today is a Wednesday! Anyway. I painted these in early April, as the daffodils were finally emerging from the (very late) snow! I also rather like that I found a way to use this stamp that doesn’t make all my fingers look the same 🙂

Since this was painted on top of a swatch test post, I started with a different color blue polish on each nail. To make them uniform, I basically dry-brushed each color over the others so the end result was a medium light blue with shimmer in it. I wanted there to be a faint wispy cloud background, and I think it looks rather cool! You can see that best on my pinky and thumb.

After the blue cloudy background had dried, I used advanced stamping (aka coloring in the stamp while it is on the stamper) and applied it to my nails. One of my last minute decisions with this was to use a dark orange in the very center of the flowers and then a lighter yellow-leaning peach for the rest of the middle. I love how it came out! I ended up goggle image searching daffodils to make sure I had the right shade of orange (all the daffodils near my apartment are yellow-on-yellow which is not nearly as much fun), and it also gave me a chance to use Freedom of Peach again! I don’t like this color on my nails as a base but it clearly works as flower centers :-p

This is getting posted today because it was the only thing I had time to edit last night (well, let’s be honest…this morning. It is currently 1am). Anyway, it wasn’t sunny outside at any point while I had these on my nails, so there are no outdoor photos! Made it easier to put together the post.

For this mani, I ended up swirling my dark red swatch test glitters together and making a random red background. With all the various red glitters and gold glitters, the final design is more sparkly than I would usually go for! There are 4 reds and 3 golds involved! Yikes. I need to make up my mind which colors to use and what to do!

That said, I did get to use my layered stamping plate (all the flowers are a gold stamp then a black stamp) and I love it! It isn’t as though it actually takes less time to double stamp than it does to simply color in a single stamp, but it makes me happy anyway. Hope you enjoyed!

Dark Purple: What makes a dark purple rather than a purple? I don’t know. These just seemed darker. Except one (which is obvious) and I couldn’t fit anywhere. All of these polishes have problems of their own however!

So. Delaney took three coats while the rest took two, and obviously does not fit. I don’t like this polish even thought I don’t own any dupes, so it is a goner! For the other three, it is a bit more difficult. I love the color of Talk, but the purple is sooo vibrant that any time I try to do nail art over it, the purple bleeds through (I know it looks blue here, I swear it is a purple). I can put down two coats of top coat and use a metallic silver and the silver will still turn purple! Violets is a very pretty polish which I would love to use more (just look at that hidden shimmer) but it SMELLS. I don’t know why anyone puts scents in their polish, if I wanted to wear perfume I would! Ugh. So awesome color but it smells like terrible fake flowers. Ink I really like, I am just sad that the pink-purple shimmer that is so evident in the bottle is not as clear on the nails. Either way, I am ditching Delaney and keeping the rest, although I want to replace Violets with a similar color that doesn’t have a smell! Pooh to you, Revlon.

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Purple Metallics: I love metallics, and in case the number of polishes shown today didn’t make it clear, I love purple metallics. There is just something about the shimmer in purple (be it red or blue leaning) that is so darn pretty! That said, I know one I am parting with!

One of these things is not like the others…and it’s the OPI. There just isn’t as much depth to Chemis-tree as there is to the Zoyas! And wow are all the Zoyas beautiful. I had thought that Iris would be a dupe for Isadora, but even with top coat (Iris is a matte), it is much lighter. Giada and Valerie are still my favorites, but I love them all! All 5 polishes covered easily in 2 thin coats, and this is obviously shown with top coat since Iris is shiny. I think I am going to get rid of Chemis-tree, it is the same shade as Valerie with the same shimmer…but I love the coarser glitter in Valerie while Chemis-tree just looks grey and muted with the fine glitter. Voila!

Sorry about the one-photo-per-swatch today, I ran out of time and honestly the photos in my lightbox didn’t look great for these! I need better lights. Also, I have begun packing to move to St Louis, so if I stop posing regularly it’s because moving has taken over my life! Also…this is my final swatch test post! It is back to nail art on Monday 🙂

Every single polish took three thin coats, but all applied well. In terms of colors, Chantal is the most yellow-leaning, while Nude is the palest by far but also leans a bit yellow-pink. Cashmere, Tape, and Rue are almost a gradient of pastel mauve to true mauve. I mostly wanted to reassure myself that Tape and Cashmere weren’t dupes for each other or anything else, and they aren’t! I also quite like both of them, even if they are boring colors!

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Pastel Pinks: So, I wanted to compare my pale pinks and my pale pink shimmer/frosts. Mostly the frosts if I’m being honest! No dupes here, but some of the colors are downright ugly! I also re-used Tape (from above) to compare a pale mauve to a pale pink.

All the polishes took 3 coats except Tape, which took two (I guess I used thicker coats). For the cremes, Doll is more of a true pastel pink than Tape, and is also a bit paler. Private is its own thing and I should have known I didn’t own any dupes! I hate how it looks of me, but it is a useful skin tone color for nail art. For the shimmers, Pearl is more of a nude frost and Giving is a true pink frost. They are actually quite different…and unsurprisingly I like Peal a lot better! I can see Giving coming in useful….if and only if (hah I just tried to write iff which means the same thing but in python, whoops) someone tells me I need to wear a baby pink shimmer to a wedding. I don’t think that will happen, so away it goes!

Light blues: I should start by saint that hate light blue polish. I kept thinking as I was laying out these polishes “why do I never wear any of these?” I feel like for all of my other swatch tests (and there will be quite a few more) there were a couple polishes I gravitated towards for base colors or nail art, and with this set of blue there was nothing that I found exciting. To be fair, if I need a pastel blue I grab Zoya Blu and if I need a medium blue I grab one of my other three blue Zoya cremes…so it is really only the range between pastel and medium blue where I have this problem.

While swatching, I realized WHY I hate using these shades of blue. None of them are opaque enough! Ugh. Breezy took three THICK coats and even so was barely opaque. Cinderella was legitimately still see-through where my free edge is and this was with three thick coats. Boat only took three regular coats but is a bit thicker than I would like as a polish, and Rather is both a bit thick and dries matte (which is why these swatch photos do not have top coat). In summary, all of these polishes took three coats, and Breezy and Cinderella were still not quite opaque at three thick coats. That said, I do love the pink shimmer in Cinderella (I would believe this polish to be the color of glass slippers), and the slightly grey finish to Boat. I cannot stand the subtle frost in Breezy, and I am probably just getting rid of this polish since I have Blu which I know I love.

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Pastel teals: I own three very very similar pastel teal polishes because unlike the blues, I love pastel teal! It is such a pretty soft color. I basically wanted a pale teal and a pale green…but a pale green looks much like a pale teal! The three of these (minus my pinky of course) ended up being very close in color, but not quite dupes!

The holo polish, Jaded, took only two thin coats, the rest were three. Worries was slightly more jelly-like than the other two, and so I used thicker coats, but it dried quickly so overall the finishes were the same. In terms of comparisons, Tiana is the palest of the three, while Worries is the closest to green rather than teal. Envy is slightly more blue and slightly brighter than Tiana, but they are very close! It does have a better formula (thinner but just as pigmented). I bought Worries and Tiana when I ran out of my first bottle of Envy (this is my third, I think) and since I use pastels a lot I just kept all three. I don’t honestly think I need them all, but I think I might keep them anyway? Tiana is the one that I could part with most easily, as Worries is more green and Envy does have the best finish! I just threw Jaded in since the base color is the same, but wheeee holo!